Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(111)

“You could have expressed this desire of yours in the daytime, but you didn’t. You came to me at night. In the dark. Why is that, Ayn?” he asked.

She had no answer for him.

“If I had accepted your advances, would you have imagined it was him?” he asked. “Your weak-minded party boy?”

“Of course not!” She was horrified. Not just by the suggestion, but by how much truth there might be to it. “How could you even think that?”

And as if this weren’t humiliating enough, who should appear at the door at that very moment but Scythe Brahms.

“What’s going on?” Brahms asked. “Is everything all right?”

Goddard sighed. “Yes. Everything’s fine.” He could have left it at that. But he didn’t. “It just so happens that Ayn chose this moment for a grand romantic gesture.”

“Really?” Brahms smirked with smug amusement. “She should have waited until you became High Blade. Power is quite the aphrodisiac.”

Now disgust was piled upon humiliation.

Goddard gave her one last glance, laden with judgment, and perhaps even pity.

“If you wanted to partake of this body,” he said, “you should have done it when you had the chance.”

? ? ?

Scythe Rand had not cried since the days when she was Olivia Kwon, an aggressive girl with few friends and serious unsavory leanings. Goddard had saved her from a life of defying authority by putting her above authority altogether. He was charming, direct, acutely intelligent. At first, she had feared him. Then, she respected him. And then, she loved him. Of course, she denied her feelings for him until the moment she saw him decapitated. Only after he was dead—and she nearly dead—could she admit how she truly felt. But she had recovered. She had found a way to bring him back. But in that year of preparation, things had changed. All the time spent tracking down biotechnicians who could perform the procedure off-grid and in secret. Then finding the perfect subject—one who was strong, healthy, and whose use would inflict the greatest amount of misery upon Rowan Damisch. Ayn was not a woman who developed attachments—so what had gone wrong?

Had she loved Tyger, as Rowan had suggested she had? She certainly loved Tyger’s enthusiasm, and his irrepressible innocence—it amazed her that he could have been a party boy and yet remain so unjaded by life. He was everything she never was. And she had killed him.

But how could she regret what she had done? She had saved Goddard, singlehandedly putting him within a hair’s breadth of becoming High Blade of MidMerica—which would leave her as his first underscythe. It was win-win on every level.

And yet she did regret it—and that dizzying gap between what she should feel and what she did feel was tearing her apart.

Her thoughts kept careening back to nonsense—impossible nonsense. Her and Tyger together? Ridiculous! What a strange pair they would have been: the scythe and her puppy dog. There was nothing about it that would have ended well for anyone. But yet, those thoughts lingered in her mind, and couldn’t be purged.

There came the complaint of door hinges behind her, and she spun to find her door open and Brahms standing on the threshold.

“Get the hell out of here!” she growled at him. He had already seen her moist eyes, which just added to her humiliation.

He didn’t leave, but he didn’t cross the threshold, either. Perhaps for his own safety. “Ayn,” he said gently, “I know we’re all facing a lot of stress right now. Your indiscretion was entirely understandable. I just want you to know that I understand.”

“Thank you, Johannes.”

“And I want you to know that if you do feel a need for companionship tonight, I am fully available to you.”

If there was something within arm’s reach to throw at him, she would have. Instead, she slammed the door so hard, she hoped she broke his nose.

? ? ?

“Defend yourself!”

Rowan was woken from sleep by a blade being swung at him. He sluggishly dodged, got nicked on the arm, and fell off the sofa he had been sleeping on in the basement.

“What is this? What are you doing?”

It was Rand. She came at him again before he could rise to his feet.

“I said defend yourself, or I swear I’ll carve you into bacon!”

Rowan scrambled away and grabbed the first thing he could to block her swings. A desk chair. He thrust it out in front of him. The blade embedded in the wood, and when he tossed the chair aside, the blade went with it.

Now she came at him with her bare hands.

“If you glean me now,” he told her, “Goddard won’t have his star attraction for the inquest.”

“I don’t care!” she snarled.

And that told him everything he needed to know. This was not about him—which meant he might be able to give it a better spin. If he could live through her rage.

They grappled with each other like it was a Bokator match—but she had wakefulness and adrenaline over him, and in less than a minute, she had him pinned. She reached over, wrenched the blade from the chair, and had it at his throat. He was now at the mercy of a woman who had no mercy.

“It’s not me you’re angry at,” he gasped. “Killing me won’t help.”

“But it’ll sure make me feel good,” she said.

Rowan had no idea what had transpired up above, but clearly it had upset the emerald scythe’s apple cart. Perhaps Rowan could use it to turn the tables. So he took a stab in the dark, before she did. “If you want to get back at Goddard, there are better ways.”